The kitten command
Bash, 19 bytes
cat "$@"|tr A-Z a-z
The best way to make kittens is to use actual cats.
Example run
$ ./kitten kitten
cat "$@"|tr a-z a-z
Perl, 6 bytes
5 bytes code + 1 byte command line
$_=lc
Example usage:
echo ABCdef | perl -p kitten.pl
abcdef
Confirmation of correct Unicode behaviour:
echo "HelloÉ" | perl -p kitten.pl
helloÉ
Perl, 11 bytes
10 bytes code + 1 byte command line
y/A-Z/a-z/
Example usage:
perl -p entry.pl input1.txt input2.txt
echo "ABCdef" | perl -p entry.pl